Zarr Format for Drones: Cloud Storage for Geospatial Data
- Anvita Shrivastava
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Drones are revolutionizing the collection of geospatial data. Their ability to collect high-resolution images is an asset to many sectors: agriculture, construction, environmental monitoring, and urban planning. However, the amount of data drones generate can be difficult to manage. This is where modern cloud-optimized storage formats, such as Zarr, have come to the rescue, allowing users to not only access these large geospatial datasets easily and quickly, but to scale their use.
What is the Zarr Format, Specifically?
Zarr is an open-source, chunked, and compressed storage format optimized for cloud workflow. It is designed to store N-dimensional arrays efficiently, allowing for quick and easy read/write access to the arrays directly in the cloud. Zarr is already supported on AWS S3, Google Cloud, and Azure, making it a superb option to run processing on large arrays in a distributed manner with Dask and Xarray.
Why Zarr Works for Drone Data
Fly your drone and you'll typically collect hundreds of gigabytes of a single flight. Zarr helps by providing:
Cloud-native access: Stream the data you need without downloading large datasets.
Parallel processing: Process chunks of data simultaneously to ease analysis.
Compression and chunking: Store cost-effective data while keeping it cloud-accessible.
Zarr is the modern way to do cloud-first geospatial work, especially when datasets need to be processed and/or accessed in bulk.
Zarr vs. MrSID: Which Format to Choose for Your Geospatial Data
Both Zarr and MrSID have advantages for working with drone data, but for different workflows.
Zarr is ideal for cloud native environments. Its chunked, compressed format allows for distributed processing in a cloud environment, such as AWS S3 and Google Cloud, for processing large datasets. Zarr also provides a way of streaming only the data needed, which reduces the amount of data you're sending in cloud environments and can speed up analytics in the cloud.
MrSID is ideal for high-performance GIS workflows. MrSID has compressions that maintain image quality yet drastically reduce file size, as well as supports multi-resolution pyramids to allow for smooth zooming and fast rendering of high-resolution imagery in desktop GIS environments. For teams that want to access drone imagery without a cloud dependency and still need reliable low-latency data transfer/responsiveness, MrSID is unrivaled.
Practical Applications
Agriculture: Save multispectral drone imagery for monitoring crop health.
Urban Planning: Effectively managing high-resolution aerial imagery for smart city initiatives.
Environmental Monitoring: Processing time series geospatial data for tracking trends in deforestation, flooding, or wildfires.
Infrastructure Inspections: Processing drone imagery in parallel for inspection of bridges, pipelines, and powerlines.
As drone technology continues to evolve, the need for cloud-native, scalable, and efficient geospatial storage solutions is more crucial than ever. While traditional formats like MrSID offer gorgeous compression and desktop interoperability, Zarr’s design for the cloud, chunked architecture, and processing in parallel creates a future-proof format for drone operators and scientists studying geospatial data. Implementing Zarr as a data format can vastly improve storage efficiency, access to data, and overall productivity for contemporary geospatial use cases.
For more information or any questions regarding Zarr or MrSID, please don't hesitate to contact us at:
Email: info@geowgs84.com
USA (HQ): (720) 702–4849
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